Competence level of Nigerian lawmakers not debatable — Rep Doguwa

Alhassan Ado Doguwa, the member representing Doguwa/TudunWada Federal Constituency from Kano State, is the chairman of the Northern Caucus of the 10th House of Representatives. The Majority Leader of the 9th House, in this interview, addresses the issue of competence level of lawmakers, the intrigues around his election that cost him his speakership ambition and […]

Alhassan Ado Doguwa, the member representing Doguwa/TudunWada Federal Constituency from Kano State, is the chairman of the Northern Caucus of the 10th House of Representatives. The Majority Leader of the 9th House, in this interview, addresses the issue of competence level of lawmakers, the intrigues around his election that cost him his speakership ambition and how the caucuses of the National Assembly operate, among other issues.

 

Lawmaking is a serious business but many still believe that the crop of lawmakers we have had in Nigeria in the past few years have not really delivered, and they keep giving examples. The recent example, they said, was the N160million SUV said to be budgeted to be bought for lawmakers in the face of the poverty in the country, with over 100million people living below the poverty line. How do you intend to change this narrative?

Members who have the capacity to be lawmakers and play to the expectations of the people are one thing, and the procedure of electing them is there. If you have 101 competent people in my constituency to come and represent the constituency excellently on the floor of the House and those people decided not to partake in the election process, people like me who may not be as competent as those people you have in mind partook in the election process and got elected. By that, we should be called as competent members of the House because we have been competently elected by our people. You cannot force the more competent ones to come.

For the past 32 years I have been coming to the House of Representatives; that does not suggest that we do not have any better person from my zone or constituency. You could have, but when such persons do not offer themselves for this public or legislative service, do you force them to come simply because they are competent?

So take it or not, those that are being elected by the process are elected because they decided to competently engage in the process of elections and their people found them competent enough to come and represent them.

So I want to disagree with you on the issue of bringing in less competent people, or that the people coming are not capable enough to make laws or participate in the governing process. It is a very wrong notion.

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Those who have offered themselves to serve Nigeria in this capacity are ordinarily the best we could have and they are doing their best.

Come to the National Assembly today and you would see that we have so many people from different professional backgrounds.

We have engineers, lawyers, pilots, retired soldiers. I don’t want to believe that these people are not competent enough to handle the legislative business of the National Assembly.

We have the right people in the right places. The Speaker, for instance, is a PhD holder. And he has a lot of private and public background in administration and what have you. So do you want to tell me that the Speaker is lacking in capacity and competence to lead the House? No. Or do you want to tell me that people like retired Generals that are in the system now, retired civil servants, some of them were even permanent secretaries of federal ministries and at the state level, some speakers of state houses of assembly who have now come together to serve this country in the present 10th Assembly are not competent? No!

 Why do you think people feel that they are not being represented well?

It is not true. The fact is that people sometimes come with sentiment. People sometimes come with envy. No matter how well you perform, people who are sentimental, people who are envious will go out in the street to make noise.

Whoever thinks that the right thing is not being done, that we are not competent, I also challenge him to go and join the process. Let them come and replace the incompetent ones. As long as you don’t have the capacity to engage in the process and replace those you think are not competent, then it is you that are incompetent. We don’t have incompetent members in the House of Representatives.

We are all competently elected by our people and we are competently doing the best we could to represent our people for the overall interest of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

About the SUV cars, why is it that you have not spoken about more sophisticated vehicles given to the presidency? Why don’t you speak about the ministers’ cars? Why would you not speak about the cars that are provided even to permanent secretaries, who by protocol are occupying lesser positions than members of the National Assembly? Why is it always about the members of the House?

There may be other priorities we may have channeled the resources to, probably to benefit our people more, but such arguments, as far as I am concerned, should be addressed holistically.

I have no problem with people expressing concerns about misplacement of priorities or misusing public funds, but it has to be done without anybody being spared. That is my position.

 As the chairman of the House Committee on Petroleum Resources (upstream), what is your assessment of the performance of that sector in 2023, especially vis-à-vis the current realities in Nigeria?

In a nutshell, the oil and gas industry today is being bedeviled with a lot of issues and challenges, ranging from security problems, financing, to lack of investment from global communities; and more especially, the takeoff of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA)

The PIA has come with a lot of visions and missions. It is like a reformatory act. It is an aggressive act, a legal framework aimed and intended at redesigning the whole industry. These are some of the challenges bedeviling it.

We (committee) are out to ensure that the noble objectives of the PIA are achieved, and this can only be achieved through aggressive transformation.

We are into the sector, the system and the industry with a vision. And we are there with a lot of determination to make sure that business will not continue as usual.

The oil and gas sector, which is the major economic stay of this country, should not always be seen as a platform for corruption; that is what is being seen now. We will check that and ensure that the right thing is being done.

Your recent appointment as the leader of the Northern Lawmakers Caucus has put you back in national limelight. What was the rationale behind this appointment and the caucus itself?

Setting up caucuses and working with their arrangements is a global thing. Virtually in most of the developed countries you also find some of these structures called caucuses.

It is from that section that the Speaker got the power to create what we call caucuses. The caucus structure is to help ease our functions in terms of administrative and parliamentary engagements.

The main leadership of the House will always want to rely on the caucuses to relate well with outside communities – religious communities, traditional institutions, or sometimes even social outfits and engagements.

Apart from that, the caucus also helps to provide succour, something like a shock absorber.   When you have as many as 360 members and there are those we call first among equals, it is going to be a very difficult thing to expect 10 people to manage 360 people at a time.

But people say lobbying is majorly what you use the caucuses to do.

Oh yes, lobbying is a constitutional instrument in the business of legislature and some parliamentary engagements. Sometimes the Speaker may have one issue or another and he may have the need to also address some concerns among members.  But you don’t expect the Speaker to always come down, even though in this case we have a very different Speaker.  For the past 32 years that I have been in the House of Representatives, this is a time I have come across a Speaker that is not only humble; he is a completely demystified Speaker.

The structure is now outlined in a form that you have a zonal regional chairman of the Northern Caucus; and that is what, by God’s grace, Speaker Abbas Tajudeen found me fit to hold brief for him. You would be surprised to hear that when we get into a meeting I preside over it because he will step down as the Speaker of the House to call himself a member of the Northern Region Caucus.

When you say zonal caucus, it has got nothing to do with party affiliation.  Any member of the House from the North, no matter his or her political party, is under the jurisdiction of my leadership as a zonal leader.

 When the election for the speakership was coming up, a lot of people expected that you would be among the frontrunners.  And when it was zoned to your region, North West, everybody expected that you would be the Speaker. In fact, you came out at the earlier stage, but eventually, you became one of the chief campaigners for the eventual Speaker.  What political drama played behind the scene that made you change your mind?

I don’t want to call it a drama, it was a political reality; and as a Muslim, I am always guided and bound by my faith.

I was the Chief Whip of the House of Representatives in the 8th Assembly. I was also the Majority Leader of the 9th Assembly under Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila.  And when I came up to vie for the office of the speakership, I lost the two.  I couldn’t get the speakership and I lost my position as the leader of the House.

I am bound by the Islamic principle that it is God that gives. This is just it.

So I don’t look at it as drama.   Parliamentary politics has always been like this, especially in a system you call federal democracy. Once you have a federal democracy where you have federating units being components of our political systems and political platforms, then definitely, this idea of give and take is always there.  This idea of rotational power is always there. That is what simply worked out.

After the election of February 25, 2022, my election process was engulfed in crises. I was into so many crises, which I want to say, without any fear of contradiction, that it was simply the handiwork of enemies, political detractors who never wanted Kano to develop, who never wanted my immediate constituency to also develop.

They came up with a lot of stories through the social and conventional media, creating malicious statements against me. There were crises but they happened naturally in the course of collation of results.

You can never imagine someone as mature as I am, who has held leadership positions for the past 32 years in the House of Representatives, doing what the detractors were saying I did. It is unspeakable.

At the end of the day, as God would have it, we have passed through a lot of judicial processes and issues at the Nigeria Police Force headquarters and I was exonerated.  The written legal advice by the attorney-general of the immediate past government of Kano State exonerated me.

We took another case to the Federal High Court in Kano and the court exonerated me. It also invalidated the decision of the Magistrate’s Court that took me even to prison.

In the last two weeks, I have also gotten a judgement from a Federal High Court here Abuja, which ordered that no one on ground, not even the governor of Kano State or the his attorney-general has the power to review a case that had been decided. The court granted all our prayers, including a cost to be paid by the government of Kano State.

Have they paid the money?

We are in the process.  Lawyers will tell us the procedure for that.  I am now waiting. I have conceded to my lawyers to let us know how we work out that.

The fact is that I am today a very contented human being, a very proud politician. After passing through all these predicaments and altercations, I am now coming out stronger.

Actually, that travail was the natural reason that bedeviled my initial intention to run for the speakership.  One, my election was adjudged to be inconclusive in the first stage. That means my election was held back.

Even when engagements started regarding the selection process of who would become the Speaker or what, I was not even yet a member of the House. I was held back, waiting for a rerun.

Secondly, after the rerun and I won, it was like coming into the space late as decisions had already been taken by our political leaders. Certainly, you wouldn’t expect the president to be waiting for somebody that was not yet a member of the House to be considered as a speakership candidate.

So you don’t see the emergence of Senator Barau Jibrin, who is also from Kano State, as Deputy Senate President affecting your chance?

No, the emergence of Barau Jibrin as Deputy Senate President was not in any way against me. It was a decision taken before I emerged as a member of the House of Representatives. So I was not in consideration.

So, the option of giving us Deputy Senate President came up perhaps because there was no one to be made Speaker from Kano.  So I don’t look at Barau’s emergence as Deputy Senate President being against me in any way. It was done in good faith, simply to supplement and even reciprocate the good contribution of the people of Kano State. His appointment as the Deputy Senate President is a welcome one.  He is doing a lot for our people. Barau is a square peg in a square hole; nobody has any problem with that.

I want to believe that the decision of the party and the president-elect then to quickly switch over and give us something else to hold on to, like the position of Deputy Senate President, was a very brilliant decision; and it has paid off.

And with what we have now, especially in the House of Representatives, Speaker Abbas Tajudeen Zazau and the North West are covered.

I can tell you that he is rated one of the highest performing speakers, especially in terms of acceptability in the face of members. Nobody is bickering. He is reaching out to everyone.

I want to say without any fear of contradiction that with Abbas Tajudeen as the Speaker, I have not lost anything.

In the last elections, only your constituency delivered across board for the All Progressives Congress. What happened in other constituencies? How was it that only you were able to deliver?

Some other local governments like Bichi and Kabo, and four others also performed wonderfully. They made state assembly seats and the House of Representatives, but what you are trying to say is that significantly, on a general note, the APC lost out in Kano.

You see, in whatever you are doing as a politician, for as long as you are always within and around your people, I want to believe that Allah would do it for you and your people would always stand by you, there’s no other secret.

I have been a grassroots politician, and I can tell you that for the past 32 years I have been in the political space, I have never been away from my constituency for 30 days.

If you don’t run away from your people and they know nobody but you, it means they will have no other person than you.

If you go to my place now, they would tell you that my political motto is, ‘If you go to the polls 1,000 times, we will win 1,000 times’.

I think identifying with them at all levels of social or political engagement is part of the secrets, as well as my performances in terms of deliverables, projects, even providing employment opportunities and empowerment. I want to tell you that this is second to none in any of the federal constituencies in northern Nigeria; go and check.

So, except God deems otherwise, I don’t think anybody can go to my locality or federal constituency and turn it upside down.

As difficult as the presidential election was because Kwankwaso was a candidate from Kano so the people mostly voted for the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), he didn’t win in Doguwa Local Government. We won in everything.